When Hurricane Helene tore through Southern Appalachia, it left behind more than toppled trees and broken bridges-it rewrote the map of what it means to belong.
In Proud Roads, Kelly Riedesel chronicles the storm's long wake: the hundred-year-old elders uprooted overnight, the X marks of rescue teams still on front doors, the way "every gust of wind, every snapping branch" startles the body long after the rain stops. Moving through prose-poems, lyric fragments, and echoes of Indigenous storytelling, Riedesel holds space for the uncounted losses-dignity buried in makeshift shelters, roads "rendered flesh at the bottom of chasms"-while also charting the routes back to each other.
Here, survival is not just a matter of endurance, but of care: the neighbor with a chainsaw clearing your way out, the mules carrying supplies over washed-out hollers, the children "watching what care looks like" in real time. Even in the face of climate trauma, Proud Roads insists on the roads-both physical and spiritual-that hold a community together:
"We are flooding back love,
standing up when we can, without comment,
sitting down when we must, without guilt,
doing the things that keep us proud."
On the first anniversary of the storm, these poems serve as an artifact and an offering-proof that the proud roads of this place are still here, still carrying those who walk them.
Kelly Riedesel is a Cree-Métis dual citizen of the U.S. and the Métis Nation of Ontario. With a background in Soil and Water Science and Microbiology, she spent her career protecting the land and water, guided by a deep awareness of our impact on the natural world. When disability shifted her responsibility away from environmental work, Kelly turned to poetry as a way to continue to uphold the Cree law of Wâhkôhtowin- the kinship and sacred collective responsibility we have that binds us to both the richness and the suffering of all creation now and in the future. Her work explores what it means to remain in relationship with each other and the land, especially through prolonged uncertainty and change.
